The Honeymoon Is Fully Booked
As of today (April 2, 2016), we’ve finally finished booking all of the major pieces of our big trip. We expect to post during the trip itself, but I figured it would make sense to use this post to provide a complete overview of the trip for those that will be following along.
We’ll leave Austin on Tuesday, May 10. We’ll return to Austin on Monday, May 30 (Memorial Day).
Stage 1: Italy
May 10: Fly into Pisa, Italy (landing the 11th) and grab our rental car, heading straight to our agritourismo: Podere San Lorenzo. It is near Volterra, and so only about an hour drive from PSA airport. We’ll hang out there some, but also venture out via our rental car.
May 13: Return the rental car in La Spezia, where we’ll hop on a train to get to Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is made up of 5 villages, and we’ll be staying in the fourth village (when heading north): Vernazza. Our hotel is called the Gianni Franzi. We’ll spend some time in Vernazza, but surely hike to other villages; they are quite close together.
May 15: Time to head out of Italy…but it’s a Sunday, and the only place that we can get a fresh rental car when we need it is an airport, so we’ll take the train from Vernazza to Genoa, and take the shuttle to the airport to pick up our rental. We’ll head west, towards France, likely stopping somewhere on the Ligurian coast on the way to get a late lunch.
Stage 2: France
May 15: We arrive at Chateau Eza in Èze, France in the evening. You do want to click on the hotel’s website link to see the awesome views that await. We do know that we’ll be eating in the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant one night, but the rest of our days there will be wandering the area. Nice and Monaco are both very close.
May 18: We’ll head into Vaucluse region of Provence to one of the small Luberon valley villages, the small hilltop town of Gordes. We’ll spend two days at the Bastide de Gordes. We expect this to be lots of relaxing and some wandering…sort of the French counterpart the first few days near Volterra.
May 20: We’ll head to nearby Avignon for just a day, as we wanted to be sure to fit in some dedicated wine time. We’ll reach our hotel, the Cloitre Saint-Louis, early enough in the morning to meet the private wine tour guide that we’ve hired. The guide will be able to provide some local knowledge, along with acting as our designated driver. It would be a shame to be all the way over there and be sipping and spitting everything on that day! We’ll focus primarily near Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with a bit of time in Gigondas as well. Some people might already know that Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines are among my (and now Kelly’s) very favorite.
May 21: We’ll return our rental car at the Avignon TGV station, as we’ll be hopping on the TGV to speed on up to Paris. We’ll be staying 4 nights at a very interesting hotel in Montmartre (in the 18th arrondissement) called the Maison Souquet.
Stage 3: London
May 25: We’ll take the Eurostar from Paris to London on May 25. We’re booked a cute place in South Kensington off of Airbnb.
May 30: We fly home out of LHR 🙁
We expect to post along the way. Aside from a few activities booked ahead of time (some food, the wine tour, perhaps a small handful of other things), our days our going to be pretty unstructured/go with the flow. We’ll each take a stab at putting up some stories of our trip, along with some photos. I expect that I’ll probably put up a few more photos after we’re back and I’m then able to get all of the shots off of our cameras.